Meet our Speakers

Peter Norvig
Director of Research
Google

Peter Norvig is a Director of Research at Google; previously, he directed Google's core search algorithms group. He is co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field, and co-teacher of an Artificial Intelligence class that signed up 160,000 students, helping to kick off the current round of massive open online classes. He is a Fellow of AAAI, ACM, the California Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and Stanford University HAI.

Michele Romanow
Co-Founder & Executive Chairman, Clearco | “Dragon”, CBC Dragon’s Den

Tech titan Michele Romanow is the Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Clearco - the world's largest e-commerce investor. The company has invested over $3.2 billion in over 10,000+ small businesses. Michele is a serial entrepreneur having started six companies before her 35th birthday.  In addition to her work as an entrepreneur, Michele is a “Dragon” on the Canadian hit TV show Dragons’ Den (Canada’s Shark Tank). She previously co-founded SnapSaves, which was acquired by Groupon and was also the Co-Founder of Buytopia.ca. A prolific investor, Michele was recently named as one of Fortune’s 40 under 40, a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and Canada’s Angel Investor of the Year. She is a regular media commentator and her work has been profiled in Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, TechCrunch, and The Globe and Mail. Michele is a director for Vail Resorts, BBTV and Queen’s School of Business.  Previously she was a director for Freshii, Whistler Blackcomb, SHAD International and League of Innovators. Michele also co-founded the Canadian Entrepreneurship Initiative non-profit.

Sam Sebastian
Vice President
Google Cloud Canada

Sam Sebastian recently rejoined Google and is responsible for all Cloud business operations in Canada and scaling Google’s enterprise technology division to the private and public sectors in Canada.

He leads a Cloud team of over 500 Googlers across five offices in Canada. Before leaving his previous role as President & CEO of Pelmorex Corp, Sam was responsible for all of Google’s operations in Canada as the VP & Country Manager from 2013-2017. He joined Google in 2006 in Chicago and held a variety of executive-level roles in the US before moving to Canada to head the business there. Prior to Google, he was a General Manager and Senior Vice-President at a large online classified business, Classified Ventures (cars.com, apartments.com), and started his career at Arthur Andersen as an accountant and consultant.

 Steve Woods
Partner & CTO
Inovia

Steve Woods joined Inovia as Partner and CTO in August 2021. Steven has worked in software development, research and technical leadership for more than 30 years. As co-founder of three software and services companies based in the USA (Quack.com, Kinitos, NeoEdge Networks), he built strong, high-performing teams of product and technical experts based in both Silicon Valley and the Waterloo-Toronto tech corridor.  One of these companies - Quack.com - pioneered the world's first interactive voice assistant and was acquired by Netscape/America Online in 2000. Steven joined Google in 2008 in order to return home to Canada and build a world-class engineering and product capability with a uniquely Canadian culture of quality, commitment and innovation. Steve led the growth and leadership development of the Google Canada product and engineering teams from 20 to over 1,300 across a range of impactful products between 2008 and 2021. In his role at Inovia, Steve brings his years of entrepreneurial and engineering experience, his passion for working with innovators and founders and his extensive network to our portfolio companies. He also plays an important role in evaluating deal flow from a product, technology and talent perspective. Steve has long been an independent investor, advisor and board member to startups, innovation networks and non-profits in the USA and Canada.

Sanjana Basu
Investor
Radical Ventures

Sanjana Basu is an Investor at Radical Ventures and has been with the fund since 2019. Radical Ventures is an AI-focused fund investing in bold entrepreneurs developing and applying artificial intelligence to invent the future. Radical was created by the founders of the leading artificial intelligence company Layer 6 (acquired by TD Bank Group), who also co-founded the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence with Geoffery Hinton. Radical recently launched its $550 million fund following a small seed fund, a $325 million first institutional fund, and a $100 million Opportunity Fund for follow-on investments. Sanjana believes AI will impact everything and is excited about technically differentiated teams applying AI to solve problems across sectors. She focuses on applied AI businesses and has led some of the firm's Healthcare AI investments. 

Before joining Radical, Sanjana invested in deep tech & consumer tech at the Venture arm of the Tata Group (~$300B Indian conglomerate). Before that, she was an investment banker at Barclays. She completed her MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore, and her undergraduate in Economics & International Relations from Tufts University in Boston, US.

Jason Scott
General Partner
ANIM

Jason Scott is a Partner at ANIM, an early-stage venture fund based out of New York and London. Prior to ANIM, Jason led Google's startup developer ecosystem in the US, and has been responsible for launching and running funds and accelerators for Google worldwide, including Google's Accelerators for Black-led, women-led and climate-focused companies. Jason also launched Alphabet's Black Angel Group in early-2021. Today, in addition to his role at ANIM and leading the Black Angel Group, Jason also remains an active seed investor and startup advisor.

Jennifer Pretti
UX Lead, Terra
Verily

Jennifer Pretti is an experienced UX designer and leader, with a career spanning over 20 years. She has worked with a range of organizations, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, and across wearable, web, mobile, and desktop product design for both consumer and enterprise solutions. She joined Google in 2018 to lead the publishing and performance marketing experiences for Stadia, and then brought her experience designing hardware products to the Nest UX Design team, where she oversaw TV and Entertainment solutions across Nest devices. In December 2021, Jennifer transferred over to Verily, as UX Lead for Terra. 

Tobias Toft
Hardware UX Lead
Google

Tobias Toft is a multidisciplinary designer, educator, and design leader with an engineering background. He’s currently leading a UX team in the AR/VR group at Google, before that he was Head of Visual Design for Google Assistant, he led the creative technology group at Pinterest, and was a Design Director at IDEO. As a staunch believer in the power of prototypes, Tobias prefers hands-on work and “building to think” as the best way to inspire and accelerate creative teams and their partners.

Sam Legge
Product Manager
Google

Sam is a Product Manager working on augmented reality interfaces & experiences. Creativity first, details second. Outside of work, Sam is planning his next outdoor adventure or pursuing his passion for puns.

Aparna Satoor
UX Designer
Google

Aparna is a UX designer with 8+ years of experience shipping meaningful solutions for complex problems. She is passionate about advocating for user-centric solutions and has facilitated over 30 Design Thinking workshops for a variety of teams and organizations. 

Ruchi Mahajan
Staff Interaction Designer
Google

Ruchi is a design leader with 18+ years of experience across domains and geographies. She works at the intersection of product strategy, user experience design, and human insights to solve complex business problems. She mentors start-up teams at Manush Labs (start-up accelerator) and provides guidance to designers in various industry forums and groups. 

Padmalatha Ragunathan

Principal Customer Engineer

Google Cloud

Padma is Principal Customer Engineer at Google Cloud Canada focusing on designing solutions for Cloud and helping enterprises mature in Cloud. She specializes in building modern apps, automations & business transformations and has experience working across multiple industries.

Osmond Ng

Enterprise Customer Engineer
Google Cloud

Osmond has more than 25 years in the IT industry. Osmond has been with the Google Cloud team for around 5 years. He is an experienced startup mentor who specializes in helping startups adopt open source, cloud technology to drive business value or innovation.

Aaron Davis

Customer Engineer, AI/ML
Google

Aaron is a seasoned startup founder who has built teams, technical solutions, strategy and culture.  He is passionate about unlocking technical solutions with a scrappy resolve.  Aaron has spent the last 15 years focusing on how Machine Learning benefits a variety of solutions and industries including NLP, CV and Time Series domains.  He holds a Master of Science in Computer Science where he researched Unsupervised Learning specifically in the NLP domain.

Geoffrey Anderson
Senior Product Manager
Google Cloud

Geoff is a product guy with extensive experience in founding, operating and growing startups through exits (3x) and utter crash-and-burn scenarios. Lots of experience in navigating fortune 500 companies with stints at Salesforce.com, Cisco, and Broadcom. I find myself always close to infrastructure, DevOps and the engineering organization in general. My hands-on product experience ranges from B2C adventures like wearables and textiles and to B2B with various SaaS solutions and Developer Tools. AI / ML, Cloud, MarTech, E-Comm, Apps, Dev Tools and more.

Alan Ranciato
Learning Portfolio Manager, App Modernization, Google Cloud

Alan joined Google in 2019 as a Cloud Customer Engineer, specializing in Application Modernization and DevOps.  Since then, Alan has joined the Learning Services organization and is now responsible for all Google Cloud training in the Application Modernization and Development areas. Prior to his time at Google, Alan held multiple development, architecture and technology leadership roles with a focus on DevOps and enterprise transformation.

Inderdeep Matharoo
Specialist Customer Engineer, Infrastructure, Google

Inderdeep is a Specialist Customer Engineer at Google Cloud, focusing on Infrastructure Modernization and Security. Specifically, Inderdeep helps enterprises realize the benefits of modernizing and migrating their on-premise infrastructure and leveraging the various solutions Google Cloud provides for heterogeneous infrastructure, as well as helping them secure their cloud-based applications and data. Inderdeep is passionate about helping companies of all sizes through their digital transformation journey and capitalizing on the benefits of Cloud. 

Farrukh Ijaz
Customer Engineer - Infrastructure Modernization Google

Farrukh has over 18 years of experience in Tech Industry and have worked with customers around the globe on Networking, Security and Infrastructure Modernization projects. Farrukh is passionate about technology and loves how Google cloud services expand the art of the possible in solving everyday challenges.

Aditya Dhekney
Customer Engineer, Analytics
Google

Aditya started his career with a 5 person startup in Toronto as a full-stack web application developer creating various e-commerce and hospital administration applications.  Since then, he has worked with many enterprise customers as a consultant and technical advisor in the analytics space for over 15 years.  Aditya is currently focused on providing guidance to companies on migrating/re-architecting/developing their analytics applications to the cloud.

Adam Muise
Principal Architect
Google Cloud

Adam Muise is a Principal Architect in Financial Services at Google Cloud. Adam has worked as an architect and technology leader with some of the largest scale data platforms in the world at IBM, Cloudera/Hortonworks, Paytm, Pythian, and Google. He is a passionate photographer and will take your picture. 

Varun Sharma
CTO & Co-Founder
Ad Auris

Varun Sharma is a full-stack web engineer, and CTO & Co-founder of Ad Auris, a B2B SaaS start-up that offers a narration tool for publishers to transform written content into podcast-like audio. Thanks to the tireless efforts of the Ad Auris team, Ad Auris has received significant support from top accelerators across North America and partnerships with venture capital firms coast to coast. While Varun is grateful for the opportunity to work with such a talented group of individuals, he is also passionate about paying it forward to tech and founder communities. As an Advisory Committee member of the League of Innovators and a speaker at Google Developer Groups, Varun enjoys sharing his experience in early stage fundraising and holds technical workshops, supporting fellow tech entrepreneurs.

Brett Popkey
Chief Technology Officer
Helcim

Brett is the CTO of Helcim and is responsible for leading the company’s technology teams, including: Software Development, Infrastructure, Data and Analytics, Security, and IT. As CTO, he led the development of Helcim’s merchant platform and grew the technology organization from 15 people to over 60 people. He holds a Bachelors of Business Administration and a diploma in Software Development.

Krystian Olszanski
CTO & Co-Founder
Cadence

Krystian has over 15 years of experience in software engineering and technical leadership. He's been an early member of successful Canadian tech startups, such as 7Shifts and Vendasta, where he gained hands-on experience though all stages of rapid growth. At Cadence, Krystian as CTO/Co-founder, leads the technical vision and product development of an application which crosses many industries. Trust-based leadership, resourcefulness and technical creativity are the foundational skills Krystian relies on daily. He uses these skills to inspire teams to deliver incremental value to the users and ensure alignment with the company's strategic goals. His favourite place to be is between business and engineering teams.

Philip Parham
AI Principles Ethics Specialist
Google

Philip Parham joined Google five years ago and for the last two years has worked with teams across the company to implement Google's AI Principles into products, research, and processes.  Prior to joining Google, Philip worked with education and health care nonprofits focused on improving equity and increasing access for underserved populations.

Taylor Roper
Program Manager
Google

Taylor Roper is Program Manager on the Responsible AI PgM team in Research and has been working at Google for a little over 2.5 years. She focuses on creating tools, processes, and resources to help teams integrate Responsible AI themes, practices, and tools into their work streams and products. Taylor is from the Chicagoland area, home of the best pizza (in the US), and is an avid fan of historically Black institutions, pierogies, and Korean dramas.

Juana Mahadik
Account Executive
Google

Juana has over 12 years of experience advising top brands on their digital marketing strategy. She has worked in various industries both B2B & B2C across India, US & Canada. She works with Canadian counterparts of Global Auto companies helping them build their marketing strategy to build brand love and sell more cars while using Google's entire suite of advertising products.

Kyle Blanchette
Platforms Sales Engineer
Google

Kyle Blanchette has been a Sales Engineer on the Google Marketing Platform team for the last 2.5 years. Prior to Google, Kyle worked at Botify - a venture funded SEO data and analytics platform. He has also spent time working with grant winners from Google's Black Founders Fund to coach founders on using Google Analytics to grow their business.

Claudia Bertuccini
Sales Engineer
Google

Claudia Bertuccini is part of the North American Google Marketing Platforms team as a Sales Engineer. She has over 8 years experience as a seller of digital technology platforms, media and advanced analytics solutions to enterprise customers. She is passionate about helping customers modernize their data & analytics practice through providing recommendations on storage and data management to enable machine learning.

Sudeep Singh
International Growth Consultant, Google

Sudeep Singh is an International Growth Consultant at Google, supporting Canada's multinational businesses fuel their global growth ambitions. He has over 9 years of experience across multiple countries and industries in analytical, insights and sales roles. He holds a Bachelors in Engineering from Mumbai University as well as an MBA from NMIMS University.

Peter Hand
Brand Strategy Lead
Google

Peter is a Brand Strategy Lead at Google with over 10 years of experience working with some of the worlds biggest & most innovative brands. Aside from his tenure in advertising Peter worked in fashion and beauty photography for years and holds a Masters in Molecular Genetics.

Liane Aihara
Product Inclusion Lead
Google

Liane Aihara transitioned at the start of 2020 into what she calls ‘ a dream FT role’ that she defined for herself, driving Product Inclusion initiatives for an 10.5k+ member organization in Google comprising 9 separate business units.  In this role she guides Googlers to build for the broadest set of users with each product or feature by fostering organizational awareness, refining existing behaviors, and defining processes and best practices that center equity and inclusion. 

Damon Greaves
Android Enterprise Enablement Lead Google

Damon Greaves is an enterprise mobility specialist, with 8+ years in the industry. He has worked with various partners and customers in Canada and in the United States. He joined Google last year as an Android Enterprise Enablement Lead, delivering comprehensive technical enterprise mobility training to Android Enterprise partners. Loves being a Dad and enjoys watching and playing basketball in his spare time.

Manjit Singh Batchu
Training Manager, ChromeOS
Google

Seeing innovations as a means to improve one’s quality of life, Manjit utilizes his energy and enthusiasm to further the relationship between people and their technology. With over 15 years of experience in sales and training, Manjit is a huge proponent of Chromebooks due to their human-centric approach to computing. Currently, he serves this ideal as the National Training Manager for Chromebooks in Canada. Manjit believes that learning should be enjoyable, and strives for his interactions to be approachable, informative, and humorous.

Hibaq Ali
Communications Manager
Google

Hibaq is a communications professional with a passion for impactful storytelling. Prior to joining Google, she was a director of integrated media at an agency in Toronto, working in tech, healthcare and consumer PR. At Google, Hibaq drives internal and external communications across a variety of product areas, and continues to tell compelling stories.